Yuli Shrine Ruins

Yuli Shrine (玉里社, Tamasato-sha) was a Japanese Shinto shrine whose enshrinement ceremony was held in 1928 (Shōwa 3) in Tamasato (present-day Yuli Township), Karenkō-chō (Hualien Prefecture), during the Japanese colonial administration of Taiwan (1895–1945). It held the status of a sha (社), a local shrine below the level of the officially ranked jinja — a 1939 district handbook noted that Tamasato District had no ranked shrine, only three such sha — and it enshrined Ōkunitama, Ōnamuchi, Sukunahikona and Prince Kitashirakawa Yoshihisa.

Situated on a hillside behind what is now Yuli Station, the shrine served as the primary Shinto worship site for the southern Hualien region. Local tradition holds that men drafted into military service during the wartime years would visit the shrine to pray for safe return before deployment. The shrine's location in the remote Huadong (East Rift) Valley made it an important spiritual anchor for the Japanese settler community in eastern Taiwan.

Following Japan's surrender in August 1945 and the subsequent handover of Taiwan to the Republic of China, Shinto shrines across Taiwan were systematically dismantled or repurposed. At Yuli, the main hall (honden) and worship hall (haiden) were demolished, but the stone infrastructure of the approach survived largely intact — a rare occurrence among Taiwan's several hundred colonial-era shrines.

Today the shrine ruins preserve two torii gates (one at the base of the hill, one partway up), 17 stone lanterns (tōrō) lining the approach, four flights of stone stairs forming the sandō, and a hyōchūhi (表忠碑) monument commemorating police officers who died on "aborigine administration" duty or of illness. The site is tucked within a residential neighbourhood, lending it a quiet, almost hidden character that contrasts with its historical significance.

On 23 July 2008, the Hualien County Government officially designated the Yuli Shrine Ruins as a county-level historic site (縣定古蹟) under the name "Remains of Yuli Shrine" (玉里社殘蹟). The site has since become a popular heritage tourism destination, attracting visitors interested in Taiwan's Japanese colonial history and the unique cultural landscape of eastern Taiwan.